The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. One area in which there is a demand to increase the ease of information transfer and convenience to users relates to provision of information sharing in P2P networks. A P2P network is generally considered a network that relies primarily on the computing power and bandwidth of the devices (i.e., peers) within the network. Accordingly, P2P networks generally do not concentrate computing power and bandwidth within servers. Rather each of the peer devices is capable of simultaneously functioning as both a client and a server to other nodes of the P2P network. The architecture of P2P networks typically involves connecting nodes via largely ad hoc connections over which participant nodes can, for example, share content files containing audio, video, data or virtually anything in a digital format. Accordingly, data such as real time data or telephony traffic could be shared using P2P network.
Given the ubiquitous nature of mobile terminals, such as mobile phones and numerous other mobile electronic devices, P2P networks are becoming more common for sharing content between individuals of social groups or social networks. These social networks may center on a group of friends, relatives, co-workers, business associates, or people who share a common interest. Each individual (i.e., node) within a social network may invite other individuals to join. As such, although any particular node may generally communicate with a given group of other nodes within the social network, each of the other nodes may subsequently communicate with yet other nodes. Accordingly, within a social network, each node may be defined in terms of a degree of separation from each other node. For example, if user A invites user B to view a particular file on user A's device, and user B subsequently invites user C to view the particular file, user B may be considered to have one degree of separation from user A, while user C may be considered to have two degrees of separation from user A. In a large P2P network, it may be possible for an invitation sent to a list including a relatively small number of other nodes to view some content at an originating device to grow into a very large list, which could burden the network. Accordingly, some originating nodes may place limits on the degree of separation a node may have from the originating device in order to gain access to the content.
However, a particular invitation which followed a tortuous flow path (e.g. a large number of degrees of separation) may not be indicative of the true degree of separation between an originating node and a recipient node based on past relationships indicated by previously received invitations. Accordingly, it may be desirable to provide a method of determining the true degree of separation between an originating node and a recipient node.